The flow of carbon into the atmosphere is the single clearest piece of evidence for the idea that humans now have a power over the Earth as great as the forces of nature
Carbon dioxide is a form of what chemists call inorganic carbon—a simple molecule that is pretty inert. Fossil fuels are made of carbon in its organic form—often complex molecules that are far from inert. Combustion turns these organic complexities into inorganic simplicities: carbon dioxide, water vapour and heat.
To appreciate the importance of this industrial carbon flow, you have to understand the carbon cycle in which it sits. At first, this context seems reassuring. Almost all microbes, and all animals, get the energy that they need for life from breaking up food made of organic molecules. The flame-free, internalised form of combustion by which they do so, which biologists call respiration, produces much more carbon dioxide than industry does.
These flows create a system in what is called dynamic equilibrium; if you push it away from current conditions, it pulls itself back. If atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels go up, the rate at which carbon dioxide dissolves into the “sinks” provided by the oceans and plants will also, all things being equal, go up. This reduces the surplus, restoring the status quo.
The world’s seas and plants have tried their best to keep things in equilibrium, responding to rising levels of carbon dioxide by stashing more away in the biosphere and oceans. They suck up roughly half of all the extra carbon dioxide that industry puts into the atmosphere. But that is as much as they can do. And so the amount in the atmosphere grows.
The growth of the two carbon sinks is also, left to itself, unsustainable. Warm water absorbs less carbon dioxide than cold water. So as the oceans warm their ability to offset emissions weakens. As to the land sink, higher temperatures speed up microbial respiration, especially in soils, more reliably than higher carbon-dioxide levels speed up photosynthesis.
This plateau will eventually subside. The erosion of the Earth’s crust exposes silicate minerals that react with carbon dioxide, eventually producing solid carbonate minerals from which the carbon cannot readily escape. But this “chemical weathering” works on a much longer timescale than the sinks.
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